Architecture and interior design made affordable

You’ve watched all the renovation shows. You’ve got your own home remodelling dreams and you’re convinced that your great taste and amateur designer skill set will be enough to pull off a project worthy of the forward pages of the decorator glossies.

You can visualise how great it’s going to look because you’ve been mulling and refining the process on the sofa for years.

Besides … you can’t afford a real architect or interior designer so this path to an almost guaranteed disaster of dysfunctional space or budget blowout is the only route you think is open to you. Not any longer.

A Melbourne penthouse project completed by The Stylesmiths Photo: The Stylesmiths

Two east coast-based services promoting architectural and interior design advice – at whatever level you wish to purchase it – are suddenly making professional design very affordable and very available to whomever needs it.

The Stylesmiths interior design services start from $60 an hour. And according to Richard Misso who commenced the Australia-first operation, the designers are often associated with major interiors practices or top of their class recent graduates.

My Architect provides a 2.5 hour master planning meeting with a qualified expert for $595. And there is an awful lot of brainstorming, discussion and reality checking that can happen in 2.5 hours.

A Melbourne penthouse project completed by interior design service The Stylesmiths Photo: The Stylesmiths

Robert Harwood, who started My Architect five years ago as one of the only non-Institute aligned entry level architectural providers, (the Victorian Architect’s Institute chapter has Archicentre), believes that all building design projects benefit from the informed input of a trained professional.

“Architects are holistic”, he says. “They have an understanding of the whole process of planning, design and building. And they can make you aware, upfront, what a project might really involve.

“We’re practical and educative, whereas a lot of those renovation shows can be pretty misguiding.”

The Stylesmiths completed projects Photo: The Stylesmiths

The Stylesmiths began in mid-2014 and already has 35 interiors experts on call. At present it can cover jobs in Melbourne and Sydney. Uptake (including a commission from a magazine editor who wants a new kitchen), has been so fast that Misso says within months there will be 50 designers on the database and the service will have the ability to cover jobs in other states.

A high end international furniture brand representative and marketer, Misso and his friend, interior designer Samantha Eades, a partner in Melbourne’s Eades and Bergman Architects, realised that there was a huge gap that consumers of interior design needed to negotiate “to get access to the type of design they see in the magazines.

“A lot of people don’t have the budget to go to the big design studios that can charge their designers out at $500 an hour,” he explains.

Work completed by My Architect

Yet, many of those same designers (with permission from their employers) happily take on sideline or private commissions and The Stylesmiths has stepped in to take them up on their availability and to link them with a waiting client base.

Vetted by Misso and Eades, clients are aligned with the nearest and best possible “match” for an initial one hour meeting to get a brief and consider a few nascent ideas. As a follow-up, they receive a rudimentary schematic outline sketch. “In an hour”, Misso says, “you can really get a good feel for a project.”

If the first match up session works out mutually, “the clients can then opt to use the designer’s services as much or as little as they like. They can work from paint and fabric choices all the way through to a completed project.”

Work completed by My Architect Photo: My Architect

The Stylesmiths has announced itself as so market savvy that it already has a range of gift card options of up to $1000. “We all know someone who needs a bit of help,” Misso says. “There are baby packages for setting up nurseries, packages for bachelors, for housewarming and for newlyweds.”

Misso reckons the service has payoff for clients and designers alike: Designers can choose the hours they work, “and for clients it makes great (design) talent accessible at a very incredible (price) rate.”

Robert Harwood’s business that fields six architects in Melbourne and Sydney, is motivated by the same impulse.

Work completed by My Architect Photo: Oliver Perrott

He says “the way architecture has sold itself as being only for luxury homes has resulted in potential clients believing that it is not easy to engage an architect and that the fees and agreements are very complicated. They also think architects want to run and control the entire project.

“We want to make it simple to get an architect involved at a reasonable price.” From an initial $595 consultation, you can go forward or not, and about nine out of 10 clients will go on to a schematic drawing. Half of those will then go forward to the next stage.”

“Any professional input it valuable in making the project better”, he concludes. “As Terence Conran said in the 1960s, ‘good design should not only be for the elite'”.